All the Lies They Did Not Tell

by Pablo Trincia

The Honorable Carlo Giovanardi took an interest in their story, and in March 1999, along with lawyer and senator Augusto Cortelloni, he brought the case to Justice Minister Oliviero Diliberto through a parliamentary interrogation. The document was long and detailed and ended with a question: “Why did they take away children who’d never said anything, and above all, children whose parents aren’t even under investigation?”

I couldn’t explain it. Not as a journalist and not as a father of two young children who’d transformed my whole existence. This story was like a black hole. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed to bend social and behavioral norms and alter the relationship between cause and effect—things I’d always taken for granted. It seemed like a parallel universe where everything was deformed. It terrified me, but I felt its perverse attraction.

I felt uncomfortable and deeply confused. Over the years, I’d built armor around myself to avoid being affected by the suffering of others. Now, for the first time, I was forced to confront anxieties and fears able to pierce that armor. These children—whose tragedies had become my daily bread—were about the same ages as my children.

Could it be true, as their parents believed, that someone had conditioned them? And if it was possible to do that, can a stranger really destroy, so quickly, the deep love that binds mother and child?

I pored over hundreds of pages day and night, without being able to clear the fog that seemed to envelop every line. How much of it was true? All of it? It couldn’t be. Nothing? It didn’t make sense. Where was the line between real and imagined? Who had drawn it and how? There was no way to find out.

Alessia and I spent months poring over documents. We reconstructed the entire case. Five trials, about twenty suspects, convictions, and acquittals that alternated and overlapped, sometimes creating the impression that there was no logic to what had happened.

But first I want to tell you: if my parents and uncles start to say that the things I say are true, be a little bit nice to them, but until they tell the truth, always stay harsh.

According to Dr. Cattaneo, Lorena and Delfino’s children showed no signs that “clearly demonstrated acts of sexual abuse.” When Dr. Maggioni pointed to a photo of a girl’s genitals and said her hymen seemed to have disappeared due to repetitive and serious acts of violence, Dr. Cattaneo pointed out that the hymen was actually clearly visible.

But there was no certainty. None of the children showed “specific” or “definite” signs. In fact—as modern scientific textbooks on the subject explain—it’s only possible to be absolutely certain sexual violence was inflicted on a minor when there are unequivocal traces like lacerations, pregnancies, or sexually transmitted diseases.

The defense maintained that these two strange characters hadn’t come to persecute Dario from Massa Finalese, but from a dark, remote corner of his mind created by the trauma caused by hours and hours of questions posed by an anxious foster mother and a young, inexperienced psychologist.

The Court of Appeals dropped all charges of abuse in cemeteries for lack of proof, partially reversing the Modena court’s verdicts. Santo Giacco and two other parents were also acquitted, while the convictions for domestic abuse were confirmed for Enzo, Emidio, Giuliano, Monica, and Giuseppe Morselli. The Court of Cassation in 2002 confirmed the verdict by the Court of Appeals. It became increasingly clear to the public that something had gone wrong in the trials of the Devils of the Bassa.

The Saint-Jean brothers were the guardians of the Sanctuary of the Obici. They had contacts in Salernes, in the south of France, where they knew people who ran a foster home that could help the Covezzis hide the newborn. Lorena and Delfino left their town one night in December 1999 on an almost seven-hour drive into the unknown. Their son was born on December 27. They named him Stefano.

During the second appeal, the Court of Cassation had expressed doubts about the methods used by the Mirandola psychologists and the technical consultants from Turin. It held that the children’s stories “lacked confirmation of any form and were received in a credulous manner” by the doctors. These same psychologists, whom Modena’s court had appreciated for their competence a year before, during the Pedophiles-1 and Pedophiles-2 trials, were now being called “young and lacking in specialized experience.”

Lorena was acquitted “for not having committed the deed.” Sixteen years after her children—now adults, now far away, now bitterly angry with her—were taken away in the dead of night.

After more than ten years, Pedophiles-4 ended in acquittals for all defendants. The prosecutor, who hadn’t believed Veronica’s accounts, told me that immediately after the verdict, someone from the Modena district attorney’s office called him to complain and ask why he’d chosen a different direction from the one taken by his Modenese colleagues up to that point.

In hindsight, the entire legal matter looked like a big, abandoned city planned by an architect who had gone mad along the way. Nothing followed any recognizable logic: two-way roads with no outlet; overpasses over nothing; curved, Escher-like buildings where each floor, each staircase, and each wall obeyed to its own law of gravity.

From any angle you looked at it, this story was incredibly grotesque. The defendants had been convicted and acquitted based on the same evidence.

“I will never give you a consultancy,” Siciliano said in her reprimand. “Let’s just say that you don’t seem to know a whole lot about the subject,” she wrote. She also stated that “an extremely wide body of photographic documentation contradicts Dr. Maggioni’s declarations so completely that one wonders whether she is utterly incompetent or if she actually means harm . . . I think these are false reports. They are reports made by people who should find a different career.”

The papers widely targeted his investigative methods, which his critics said were clouded by a strong prejudice of guilt. The papers listed cases of his where people ended up in court on flimsy evidence that was contaminated by incompetent consultants.

To him we owe (or blame) the creation of an “investigative method” used in hundreds of rape and abuse trials: police special units gathering statements or testimonies from presumed victims; loyal gynecologists and psychologists providing expert opinions; children’s private confessions to teachers used as evidence; charges of complicity against spouses and relatives who do not confirm the accusations; coordination with juvenile courts to immediately remove children from suspects; close collaboration with a narrow group of institutions specializing in child care. A judicial “machine” that is so efficient, according to critics, that it is merciless, even with the innocent.

Her subsequent tirade described what she considered to be an undeniable truth. “The expert testimony was seen by seventeen other experts, all of whom confirmed the extremely serious lesions.” This wasn’t true. All the other experts had made much more cautious pronouncements.

Despite her extensive experience in court, Dr. Maggioni seemed to ignore basic concepts of criminal law. Anyone with a minimum of familiarity with legal matters would know that those judges didn’t have the power to strip a doctor of their license, especially not in a trial where she acted as a consultant, not a defendant.

I would only find the answer far from Mirandola and Massa Finalese, on another continent, in another time.

Similar events appear in annals and news reports from all over the world. They’re all born of a similar root: the idea, or the fear, that in every community there are individuals or groups of people leading double lives, lacking all sense of good, who are ready to commit atrocities in the name of absolute evil.

Then I came across a text by an academic in Turin, Massimo Introvigne. In Satanism: A Social History, he explains that this phenomenon has fairly recent origins.

A century later, Aleister Crowley, an English student of the occult, defined the basic rules of Satanism: “‘Do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the Law. There is no god but Man.”

Satanism first came into the light in 1966, when esoterist Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in California, turning the movement into a full-blown religion. To this day, it has a registered office, a website, and a radio station. Adherents worship Lucifer not so much as evil incarnate, but as a symbol of freedom, which they associate with pleasures like power, sex, and money.

Two years later, in 1980, American stores started selling the book that would unleash the Satanic Panic, one of the biggest cases of mass hysteria of all time. Michelle Remembers was the story of Michelle Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Victoria, British Columbia, who had sought treatment for depression from Dr. Lawrence Pazder.

There was a new enemy in town—internal, invisible, and far more dangerous than the Communist menace represented by the distant Soviet Union. This one could worm its way into cities and schools, where it attacked the smallest and most helpless members of society. And it had a name: SRA, which stood for “satanic ritual abuse.”

The McMartin trial was the longest in the history of the United States and concluded after seven years with the acquittal of all the defendants.

Meanwhile, a collective hysteria had developed, fueled in part by the media. TV personalities like Oprah started to host people on their programs who said they’d been part of sects that forced them to eat human flesh.

The truth came out much later, in 2009. The young psychologist who’d examined “patient zero” and confirmed the suspicions of his mother and the police, told the Austin Chronicle that he’d been wrong. At the time, he didn’t have enough experience to recognize what was in fact a perfectly normal clinical profile.

She went to Dr. Donati, and together they harangued the child with questions. After that, like all the “patient zeros” of the world, Dario named names: Igor, Romano, Adriana. In no time, the phenomenon was creeping to other families like a dense, black fog and sparking a chain reaction.

They were seeing the familiar traits of a worrisome social phenomenon that was very similar to Europe’s caccia all’untore of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when anyone suspected of spreading the plague would be hunted down.

In 1992, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning published a report that expressed strong doubts about the existence of ritual violence. Reports were piling up in police stations from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. “One mother told me that for the first time since the victimization of her young son she felt a little better,” Lanning wrote. Before then, her options had been to face the fact that her son lived in a community controlled by Satanists or accept the idea that he was a pathological liar.

It’s like the Jewish ritual of the scapegoat, in which the animal was laden with all the evils of a people and sent into the desert. This allowed the community to consider itself purified. By the same token, parents unable to make sense of common phases of discomfort and distress in children try to pin their problems and anxieties on someone else.

“Finding the bad guy restores peace of mind,” Giuliana Mazzoni told me. She is a world-renowned professor of psychology who specializes in mass psychosis. “It restores the ability to live with oneself and not have to say, ‘It’s my fault.’”

America’s paranoia began to cross national boundaries at the start of the 1990s, when it arrived in the United Kingdom. Mazzoni told me that many of the British communities that succumbed to it had recently hosted seminars where experts—or alleged experts—“basically told teachers and parents about the existence of collective sexual abuse based on Satanism, and they invited parents, teachers, and social workers to question the children, without actually teaching them how to question the children. And it’s extremely curious how a few months after these seminars, the reports started to rain down.”

But in this case, investigators were immediately suspicious of these accounts. There are very few trees on the Orkneys, and large nighttime bonfires would have been seen from miles away.

Fear of the Devil took flight for a new destination, and a few years later, it landed in Bologna. On February 22, 1996, La Repubblica published an article that read like a review of the latest horror film to hit the theaters:

A three-year-old boy, locked in a dark coffin, imprisoned in a grave during a satanic ritual, with a skull in his hands. “Let’s play a game,” they told him. “Like at the movies.” And like a good boy he obeyed, at least the first time. His “aunt’s” friends certainly didn’t want to hurt him. So he slipped in between the marble walls of the burial recess without a peep. And he let them lock him into the small coffin.

In June 1997, after months of media attention, Marco Dimitri and the Children of Satan were acquitted. At that very moment, some forty miles away, in a room at the Cenacolo Francescano in Reggio Emilia, a bespectacled blond boy who was a bit straminato was talking to a young psychologist from Mirandola and prosecutors from Modena. He was giving up the names of a new cast of monsters, the Pedophiles of the Bassa.

Most of what we had were transcripts from a meeting with the judge about preliminary investigations. The rest of his declarations had been reported through the mouths of Dr. Donati and Mrs. Tonini. Dario was like a ghost. A hologram with no voice, unable to give his version of events. We couldn’t for the life of us find an exhaustive, authentic account given by him in the first person, without any filters.

But tracking him down also raised a significant ethical dilemma. What right did I have to knock on his door and make him relive his trauma? I meant nothing to him and had nothing to do with his story. I had no idea how he’d fared in the following years, or what kind of therapy he’d undergone, or whether he’d learned to manage his trauma and nightmares as he got older.

After Dario’s revelations of abuse, cemeteries, and ritual killings came to light between February 1997 and October 1998, his world transformed into a house of mirrors. His perceptions were forever altered. The concepts of real and imaginary were now fused into one big caldron of nightmares, anxieties, and fears of persecution, making him even more unstable. And even more insecure. And maybe even more alone.

“How is he?” she asked his teacher, Ms. Marinella. “Is he fitting in well with the class?” Ms. Marinella said that Dario was a bit unusual. He had moments of “zoning out, of melancholy,” and sometimes she had to call him back to reality.

We decided that the best thing to do would be to give him and the other children the chance to see this story from a different perspective, now that they were adults with the ability to read case files with a critical eye. It would be painful, this was for sure. But maybe it would help shed some light on what really happened.

The house on Via Abbà e Motto in Massa Finalese was the last known home of the Galliera family. It’s a decrepit yellow building on a dirt road. You can get there by turning off the main avenue onto a country road with no trees and heading toward the town of Macchioni. The house stands at a bend in the road, empty and abandoned, shrouded in fog, surrounded by weeds.

As rumors jump from mouth to mouth, any truth that is left risks falling off somewhere along the way, and a word that sounds like deprivation suddenly becomes depravation.

The doctor who examined him right after the first reports of abuse said no. Then, social services stopped bringing children to him. He was replaced by Dr. Maggioni. It became clear that the concept of a medical opinion was relative in a court of law. As was the opinion of a psychologist. Or a conviction. Or an acquittal.